Two posts for the price of one!
But be warned: If parental stories bore you, well, you'll be bored.

Just when I get to the point where I really hate my job, The Boss goes and does something along the lines of giving me two tickets to a baseball game. And not just any tickets. The Boy and I sat three rows up from the first-base (home team) dugout, and watched a hell of a ballgame.

The Boy is 3. He doesn't really care that Joaquin Benoit picked up his first major-league win by helping the Rangers shut down the high-scoring Chicago White Sox, 4-1. He doesn't care that Benoit was supported by his batterymate, catcher Hector Ortiz, who hit his first major-league homer to tie the game at 1 in the second inning. He doesn't care that Alex Rodriguez, he of the $252 million contract, had two hits and two tremendous defensive plays. But he was incredibly well-behaved, never acted bored during the whole game, clapped at usually appropriate times and was even polite enough to not join me in booing John Rocker (who, by the way, pitched a perfect seventh in relief of Benoit; I take back all the bad things I said about him.)

It goes without saying that our first trip to a major-league ballgame was a big father-son moment for me. My dad and I never had a chance to do anything like that; partly because he was pretty busy and partly because when I was a child, he and I shared few common interests. I don't resent him for that, or anything; that's just the way it was.

It's been a long time since I spent three hours enjoying myself as much as I did, selfish as that may sound. It helped turn around what started out as a pretty bad day for The Wife and me. We spent three hours of our morning at the local children's hospital with the Young Daughter, getting the latest on her dread disease. Despite being a perfectly well child with a few spots on her skin, she was poked and prodded by various people with initials behind their names.

As a reminder: She's not sick. She's doing just fine. She's just carrying this particular gene mutation around with her, and it's poised to strike at any time. This is one of the downsides of being a parent; you take the risk that one of your children might have to go through something like this.

Which is why I found myself reading a medical research story last Friday in the Very Large Metropolitan Newspaper, a story I normally would skip. Researchers at a local medical school believe they are on the verge of developing a treatment for the currently untreatable disease. "If our speculation is right, in five years we'll be able to greatly change the quality of life of patients with neurofibromatosis," said Dr. Luis Parada, a molecular biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

I don't think I have ever hoped more for somebody's speculation to be right. The Young Daughter will be almost 7 in five years. If ever there's a time you deserve to have the greatest quality of life possible, it's when you're 7.

It was good to get a chance to watch Alex Rodriguez do his thing on Thursday. But I'd sooner ask for Dr. Luis Parada's autograph.